Political Scene: Stock Market Downer

The debt ceiling may be raised, but the stock market has plummeted. The market closed today with the biggest drop since the financial crisis: a 512.76 point, or 4.31 per cent, drop for the Dow Jones industrial average, and even bigger percentage dips for the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index (4.78) and the Nasdaq (5.08).

This kind of thing keeps happening again and again. It’s as if our system is getting hardening of the arteries. We get a stent once in a while or we take nitroglycerine, but to me it’s getting scarier and scarier over the long haul.

Oh, wait. Not encouraging. But then there’s this, from Hertzberg:

There are a lot of ways you could build something from scratch that would look roughly like the society we have now but would work better, would be smoother, would be fairer, and all that. And of course these things are proposed in politics.

Yes, this sounds better. He continues:

And then they cannot be done. Then our system prevents them from happening or garbles them in such a way that they look supremely ugly once they’re created, such as our health-care system. And this is a machine for creating disillusionment with government, cynicism, Tea Partyism, and, over time, this is our country, our democracy, eating itself alive and bringing itself down and being helpless to do anything about it.

James Surowiecki, who joins Hertzberg on the podcast, has this to say, which could almost, sort of pass as not wholly depressing:

I don’t think it’s entirely a coincidence that the stock market has fallen steeply during all this debt-ceiling crisis and even after the resolution, because people are starting to see that the economy is in really bad shape, and we’re not going to get any help at all from Washington. That may be what the House Republicans want, but I don’t think it’s what businesspeople want.